Heroine Addict

What Theodor Fontane’s women want.

In women, Fontane found a way of critiquing Prussian society.Credit ANDRÉ CARRILHO

Whatever others may have thought of the novels of Theodor Fontane—and the long-standing consensus is that they are, as one critic has noted, “the most completely achieved of any written between Goethe and Thomas Mann”—Fontane himself clearly thought that they were pretty unexciting. To his mind, “L’Adultera” (1882), one of the studies of tormented heroines on which his present-day reputation rests, was primarily about “the circumstantial and the scenery.” He characterized “The Poggenpuhls” (1896), the story of an aristocratic family frantically maneuvering to extract itself from genteel poverty, as a book that “is not a novel and has no subject-matter.” In May of 1898, a few months before he died, at the age of seventy-eight, he wrote a letter rather wearily describing “The Stechlin,” the unusually “pudgy” tome (most of his fiction is bracingly short) that was the last work he lived to see published:

An old man dies and two young people get married,—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages. Of complications and solutions, of conflicts of the heart and conflicts in general, of excitement and surprises there is virtually nothing. . . . Naturally I don’t claim that this is the best way of writing a contemporary novel but it is the one that is called for.

Even Fontane’s characters are plagued by a certain anxiety about having nothing very exciting to talk about. In “Cécile,” an 1887 novel about a good woman trying in vain to bury a bad past, a group of tourists in the Harz mountains are taken around a medieval castle; unnerved by a visitor’s embarrassment that there’s not much to look at, the tour guide “rapidly resumed his lecture in the hope of compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible items of interest.”

Compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible interest is an excellent way to sum up both the strangeness and the beauty of Fontane’s fiction. The topography of his plots is admittedly as flat and monotonous as the notoriously bland landscape of his Prussian homeland, Brandenburg (about which he lovingly wrote in a multivolume work). Most of “Cécile” is devoted to the excursions and the chitchat of those hapless tourists; there’s some gossiping, a halfhearted flirtation, and then everyone goes home to Berlin—the revelation of Cécile’s sexually compromised early life arrives agonizingly late in the novel, and the dénouement, as often in Fontane, is swift, efficient, and a little surprising. In “Jenny Treibel” (1892), a wry social comedy with darker political overtones, a young woman makes a play for the son of the self-absorbed title character, one of the nouveaux-riches bourgeois—a class much loathed by Fontane—who dominated German society after Bismarck unified the nation. After the girl has done a good deal of scheming, her plan simply fizzles out. (Fontane loves to create plots in which the characters’ own plots never quite work; for all the Poggenpuhls’ agonized machinations, what saves them in the end is a fortuitous event.)

And in the 1895 novel “Effi Briest,” considered by many to be Fontane’s masterpiece, the suffocating dreariness of the young heroine’s provincial existence is brilliantly conveyed precisely because the author isn’t afraid to be dreary himself; by the time you’ve got through a few dozen pages in the Baltic town of Kessin, accompanied by Effi’s excruciatingly correct, “frosty as a snowman” husband, you’ll feel like breaking down in tears, too. Fontane’s taste for withholding action, or at least delaying it improbably, is evident in the novel’s most famous feature, a structural gambit of daring subtlety: the frustrated heroine’s brief affair with a womanizing officer is never actually described—and is only discovered many years later, when Effi and her husband have settled comfortably into their marriage. (His pursuit of revenge is thus rendered all the more appalling—an effective vehicle for condemning ludicrous codes of masculine “honor.”)

When “excitement and surprises” do occur in a Fontane novel, it’s usually when the book is nearly over. The death, or suicide, or marriage, or resignation in the face of overwhelming social or familial pressure is a culminating little bump in the otherwise long, smooth, and highly scenic road. (He features more suicides than any other German writer of his century; even these are characteristically quiet.)

At first glance, it’s hard to reconcile the sparseness of Fontane’s plots, the way he prefers to linger over what he calls “the circumstantial,” with the extravagant emotions his work has provoked in so many critics and writers over the years. (Thomas Mann: “No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue.”) The key lies in his understated narrative style, in his paradoxically powerful “discretion,” as some critics have called it: a gift for obliquity, for knowing what to leave out, and above all for letting the reader “overhear” the speech of his characters, rather than paraphrasing it for us—the last being a particularly effective alternative to the psychologizing observations of an omniscient narrator. It is this skill at delineating character through dialogue—one early scholar of Fontane’s work calls a scene in “Effi Briest” “the greatest conversation scene in the German novel”—which creates the sense of intimacy that his novels have, the sense that you’re in there with his characters: the attractive but somehow desperate wives, yearning for recognition in a society dominated by masculine and military codes; the minor nobles, hardworking seamstresses, and disdained intellectuals trying to keep their dignity in a world destabilized by the materialism and the militarism of Bismarck’s Second Reich.

Fontane’s courteous technique is ideally suited to his rueful wisdom. In his fiction, love doesn’t triumph over class distinctions (“On Tangled Paths”), individual suffering inevitably yields to hard social and political realities (“The Poggenpuhls,” “Effi Briest,” “Cécile,” “The Stechlin”), and climactic reconciliations don’t quite take (“Irretrievable”). He’s the great novelist of what you might call dignified defeat; his characters’ failures outline a muted critique of politics and society. This preference for suggestive description over ambitious prescription set Fontane apart from other late-nineteenth-century realists. In an 1883 letter to his daughter—part of the voluminous correspondence that established him as one of the century’s great letter writers—he remarked that he would have become a Turgenev or a Zola had he not been far more interested in individuals than in society as a whole.

Long revered on the Continent, Fontane has had a hard time catching on in this country. Although he lived to old age and published extensively from his youth until the time of his death, no major work of his enjoyed a complete English translation until 1964. It may be that, caught between Goethe’s protean genius and Mann’s fin-de-siècle neuroticism, Fontane simply isn’t what we think of when we think of what a great German author ought to be. (If Mann has the temperament of a patient, Fontane has that of a physician. Ours is an age of patients.) The recent publication of two of his most delicate and beautiful novels will, with any luck, help turn the tide. One is the bittersweet romance, from 1888, “On Tangled Paths” (translated by Peter James Bowman; Angel Books; $21.95); the other is a curiously gentle tragedy called “Irretrievable,” first published in 1891 (translated by Douglas Parmée; New York Review Books; $15.95). Together, they convey the distinctive allure of an author who prided himself above all on his “finesses” and whose two salient traits—a severe reserve and a profound empathy—stemmed from an unusual ability, as Mann put it, to see “at least two sides to everything in life.”

Fontane himself was a mass of contradictions. He was a product of the middle class attracted to the aristocracy, a German patriot who admired England and came to detest Prussian militarism, a writer besotted with the “Romantic-Fantastic” who nonetheless had a zeal for collecting the hard facts of history, a liberal who spent much of his career working for an ultra-rightist newspaper, a well-known balladeer, a dogged journalist, an admired travel writer, and a prolific military historian whose extraordinary talent for writing fiction ripened only late in a life that had many more than two sides.

He was born on the next-to-last day of 1819 in Neuruppin, a military garrison town northwest of Berlin, to parents descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Prussia in the seventeenth century. Both his mother and his father, a rather eccentric apothecary, had firsthand experience of the Napoleonic wars, a national trauma that exercised a hold on the writer’s imagination all his life. (His first novel, “Before the Storm,” published in 1878, was a historical epic set during the wars, an attempt at a kind of Prussian “War and Peace.”) From Fontane senior, the future writer received a peculiar but effective education: the father enjoyed reënacting great moments from the wars with his young son. At least some of Fontane’s interesting bifurcations, political as well as temperamental, may be attributed to his mismatched parents: his father the Prinzipienverächter, the hater of rigid principle, his mother a Prinzipienreiter, a stickler for principles.

At sixteen, Fontane finished with his formal education and apprenticed as an apothecary. But his literary tastes and ambitions were already in evidence: he published his first story (about a quasi-incestuous brother-sister relationship) when he was not quite twenty, and in his mid-twenties he began publishing ballads and verses. In 1844, he was invited to join a Berlin literary club called Tunnel Over the Spree, and made the first of what would be a number of enthusiastic trips to England. (He had learned English by reading, and had translated “Hamlet” into German.) In 1848, that year of political upheaval throughout Europe, he had manned the anti-government barricades in Berlin, but his relationship to liberal politics, like everything else about him, was far from straightforward. The grandson of a courtier of the Prussian Queen Luise, for whom he maintained a lifelong reverence, and an on-again, off-again admirer of Bismarck, whose speeches he loved to read over breakfast (and whose style he compared, favorably, to Shakespeare’s), Fontane had an abiding admiration for the values of the old Prussian nobility, the Junkertum: simplicity, honor, and directness. As the scholar Alan Bance has pointed out, these values surface in Fontane’s greatest female characters, who often struggle to uphold them against the crassness of men, society, the new Prussian state.

By the time Fontane was thirty, he had decided to abandon the apothecary and embrace a life of writing. In 1850, he married Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, another descendant of French Huguenots, and soon afterward took a job in a government press office. A year later, when the first of the couple’s seven children was born—four lived to adulthood—Fontane, eager for some financial stability, queasily accepted a job writing about English affairs for Die Kreutzzeitung, a government-run newspaper. (“I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month,” he wrote a friend.) He was in England for several months in 1852, and in 1855 he began a three-year stint there; his job was to plant stories favorable to the Prussian state in the British press. He spent a great deal of time going to the theatre, and—prompted by his impassioned reading of Walter Scott and Robert Burns, and English and Scottish ballads, all faddishly popular among Germans in the mid-nineteenth century—taking long walks in the Scottish countryside. These walks partly inspired his splendidly discursive and erudite “Rambles in the March of Brandenburg,” whose combination of sentimental enthusiasm and the amateur’s besotted aptitude for historical anecdote and geographical and zoological minutiae suggests a kind of proto-Patrick Leigh Fermor. (In an affectionate study of Fontane, the historian Gordon A. Craig retraced the author’s steps.)

Fontane returned to Berlin in 1859 and (after briefly considering a post at the court of the mad Ludwig II of Bavaria) set to work on “Rambles,” which occupied him for the next two decades. But this was also the period in which Prussian political and military ambition exploded, culminating in three major wars—against Denmark, in 1864; Austria, in 1866; and France, in 1870—and the unification of Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns. Fontane published three major, exhaustively researched studies, one for each war. Contemptuous of “making books out of books,” he conducted extensive interviews and visited various battlefields, sometimes before hostilities ceased; at one point, he was captured by French troops, and Bismarck had to intervene to get him released. Fontane later wrote a book about the experience. Despite his historian’s admiration for Prussian warcraft, Fontane came to speak out with increasing vigor against the chauvinism, jingoism, and triumphalism that characterized so much contemporary writing about the wars. “The mere glorification of the military,” he later wrote, “without moral content and elevated aim, is nauseating.”

At the end of the eighteen-sixties, as he reached his fiftieth birthday, Fontane quit his post at the conservative, God-and-country Kreuzzeitung. (He waited to submit his resignation until the long-suffering Emilie—who wrote out the fair copies of each of his books and never quite believed that he would succeed as a writer—left for a vacation.) Soon afterward, he jumped at the opportunity to replace the recently deceased theatre critic for the liberal Vossische Zeitung: certainly because of the promise of a regular income but also, undoubtedly, because it provided an outlet for his love of the theatre. His criticism—conversational yet informed, often crustily amusing (he once wrote of a production of “Macbeth” that all the roles were played badly except that of the rain, which beat convincingly against the walls of the castle)—further increased his fame. He remained happily on the job for the next twenty years.

Many critics have looked to various aspects of Fontane’s life—not least, his French ancestry—for clues to a style that was so fresh, so lifelike: so different, in a word, from that of many of his contemporaries. (The author’s relationship to his Frenchness was typically bifurcated: he liked to talk about his “essentially southern-French nature,” but also called knowing French “a great virtue, which I do not possess.”) But it seems clear that he owed much to his deep love of, and appreciation for, the theatre—instilled, you suspect, during those play-acting sessions with his father. His distinctive way of letting his characters reveal themselves through monologue and dialogue (or letters, or poems—anything that lets them speak for themselves) betrays an intuitive feel for the theatrical. “Jenny Treibel” opens with the title character, an arriviste with grand dynastic ambitions, bustling into the home of her childhood sweetheart, now a colorful old professor whose daughter, Corinna, will soon threaten Frau Treibel’s plans:

My dear Corinna, how nicely you know how to do all this and how pretty it is here, so cool and fresh—and the beautiful hyacinths! Of course they don’t go very well with these oranges, but that doesn’t matter, it looks so nice. . . . And now, thoughtful as you are, you’re even adjusting a pillow for me! But forgive me, I don’t like to sit on the sofa; it’s so soft and you always sink in so deeply. I’d rather sit over here in the armchair and look at those dear old faces there.

Fontane’s novels are filled with characters who talk and talk and, in so doing, reveal themselves more damningly than an omniscient narrator could. Can you doubt that Corinna and Jenny will clash? Do you doubt who will prevail?

The years of theatre criticism, of having to articulate his responses to others’ writing, were surely crucial to Fontane’s evolution as a novelist, strengthening his sense of his own aesthetic responses, his own powers as a writer and thinker. “I have an unconditional confidence in the rightness of my feeling,” he once wrote. “I am wholly free from veneration of names or the cult of literary heroes.” An arresting passage in a collection of his critical writings suggests where Fontane’s veneration did, in fact, lie. He recalled how he would sometimes go into one of the city’s many Gothic churches to clear his head after a matinée. One day, following a particularly unsatisfactory performance of “Iphigenia in Tauris,” he wrote of something that had affected him tremendously: “Hidden behind a pillar, I saw a man crying, which shook me more than three acts of tragedy.”

It’s a fascinating moment, because the best of Fontane’s mature fiction is filled with eerie minor epiphanies that have a powerful effect on a given character—and on the reader. In “Effi Briest,” the apparition in a window of the teen-aged heroine’s twin playmates, at the moment she is to be betrothed to the much older nobleman her mother has chosen for her, seems to symbolize the poignant tension between the girlish “child of nature” and the social role she is still unprepared to play—a tension that ultimately destroys her. In “On Tangled Paths,” the lower-class heroine, a seamstress involved in an impossible love affair, sees a young girl washing pots in the river, a vision that somehow irrefutably conveys to her the fact that there will be no way to flout social conventions.

Such moments represent a crucial facet of Fontane’s art. He liked to say that he had a well-developed sense of Tatsächlichkeit, “factuality”; for him, the trick of literature was to “transfigure” everyday facts into something elevated, imbued with Rätsel and Halbdunkel, “mystery” and “twilight.” (“A piece of bread . . . is poetry,” he once wrote.) He disdained Turgenev—interestingly, Bismarck’s favorite novelist—for failing to transcend Tatsächlichkeit, for having merely a “photographic apparatus in eye and soul.” In the novels of Fontane, apparitions like the one he beheld in the church that day, essentially theatrical in nature, are instances of “facts” elevated into memorable art.

As he was nearing sixty, Fontane made the extraordinary announcement that he was ready to begin a new career—as a novelist. “I am only at the beginning,” he wrote his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, in 1879, with a touching combination of bravado and trepidation. “There is nothing behind me, everything is ahead, which is both fortune and misfortune at the same time.” As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. For the next two decades, he and Emilie lived at 134c Potsdamer Strasse, where he produced the seventeen novels that marked him as a great writer.

It’s not surprising that Fontane’s first novel was a work of historical fiction: partly the factuality of the past, partly the twilight mystery of literary art. Some readers at the time found “Before the Storm” a disconcertingly becalmed work: the author’s languid eavesdropping was, they found, ill suited to a subject that raised expectations of high color and excitement. (“Will they sit down at the table again? Will they go to sleep again?” one of Fontane’s many correspondents wrote of the characters in that “silly” book.) It took Fontane a while to find the proper vehicle for his talent for depicting everyday realities imbued with the poetic—ordinary people reaching for (and, as often as not, failing to attain) transcendence. That vehicle, as the literary world soon discovered, was women.

As is the case with certain male writers famous for their female characters—Euripides, Tennessee Williams—women in Fontane’s work often represent energies and emotions for which there is no room in the world created by men: the world of Realpolitik and bombastic officialdom, of matrimonial hypocrisy and erotic double standards. This is why, as with those other authors, Fontane’s women are often both impressively self-aware and memorably broken. “If there is a person who has a passion for women,” Fontane confided in some friends in 1894, “and loves them almost twice as much when he encounters their weaknesses and confusions, the whole enchantment of their womanhood in full flight, that person is I.” It would be hard to think of a better way to describe the figures on whom the author’s reputation as a master of characterization and delicate plotting is based. Such weaknesses and confusions, the feminine enchantment in full flight—in both their comic and their tragic expressions—make “On Tangled Paths” and “Irretrievable” small masterworks.

“On Tangled Paths” (“Irrungen, Wirrungen” in the original, a rhyme nicely finessed in an earlier translation, entitled “Delusions, Confusions”) has a typically unfussy plot. Lene Nimptsch is a pretty young seamstress in love with Botho von Rienäcker, a dashing officer from an aristocratic family; he loves her. They spend time together; he teases her foster mother and the neighbors; the couple make an overnight excursion on the Spree. (Readers weren’t the only ones outraged by Fontane’s unsensationalistic depiction of the casual sexual relationship in the newspaper where the novel was first serialized. “Won’t this dreadful whore’s tale soon be over?” one of the paper’s owners protested.) Eventually—and it takes some time—Botho’s mother reminds him that he must marry a suitable girl. This he does, reluctantly at first: she’s an airhead and a chatterbox. (Fontane just lets her rattle on.) Lene, for her part, ends up marrying a nice enough man. At the novel’s close, both young people have accepted their fates, though not without complex emotions: “Our hearts have room for all sorts of contradictions.” That could be Fontane’s motto.

So there aren’t many visible items of interest; the immense pleasures of the novel lie in the author’s cool-headed approach to what, in other hands, could have been a forgettable melodrama. As often in Fontane, the drama is internal, and, at first, internally generated; when the “excitement” happens—in this case, the intervention of Botho’s mother (in a letter)—it’s just an external correlative to something already present in one or more characters. The love affair in “On Tangled Paths” is shadowed from the start by the practical-minded Lene’s unblinking understanding that a romance like theirs cannot last:

“One day I’ll find you’ve flown away. . . . Don’t shake your head; it’s true, what I say. You love me and you’re true to me—at least my love makes me childish and vain enough to imagine it. But fly away you will, I can see that very clearly. . . . You love me but you’re weak-willed. We can’t change that. All handsome men are weak-willed, and ruled by stronger force. . . . What is it? Well, either it’s your mother or people’s talk or circumstances. Or maybe all three.”

It’s a remarkable speech to encounter in the mouth of a young woman in a late-nineteenth-century novel. Botho, as it turns out, is weak-willed, and bows to his mother’s demands. What saves him, and the novel—it’s an element that makes for a more stimulating richness of perspective, and makes it harder to “blame” any given character—is that he is ultimately as realistic as Lene, if rather more prone to self-justification. “Do I mean to marry Lene? No. Have I promised her I would? No. Does she expect it? No. Or will parting be any easier for us if I defer it? No, no, and no again.”

Lene suffers less than some of Fontane’s women because of her class—because her horizon of expectations is narrower than that of Effi or of Cécile, those unhappy wives of high-ranking husbands. Like them, she’s astute about the limitations that the world sets on her ambitions, but the ambitions are more realistic and the limitations more relaxed. The pleasure of “On Tangled Paths” is not the thrill of watching a female character struggle against social convention, as so many great heroines of nineteenth-century literature do, but the perhaps more complicated pleasure of recognizing a character who knows when to give in.

Still, a sadness hangs in the air, owing in no small part to the innumerable touches the author employs to build up his subtle but affecting portrait of a young woman who is ignorant but not stupid, romantic but not foolish. (She’s the inverse of Emma Bovary—more interesting, too.) At one point, Lene uncomprehendingly examines the English captions on two prints in the room where she’s staying with her lover—“Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “The Last Hour at Trafalgar.” Fontane takes this casual moment and turns it, wonderfully, into a symbol of why the relationship can’t last: “But she could do no more than combine the letters into syllables, and, trivial as the matter was, it nonetheless gave her a pang by bringing home to her the gulf that separated her from Botho.” The book is filled with comparable moments of small facts transfigured into something magical.

“Irretrievable” takes the same elements—an appealing man, charming but weak; a clear-eyed, practical-minded woman, perhaps a little pessimistic; a relationship that can’t go anywhere; resignation in the face of life’s realities—and, as its stark title suggests, turns it into a tragedy. It’s one of Fontane’s most idiosyncratic achievements, and certainly one of the finest literary autopsies of a foundering relationship. (The New York Review Books edition is a reprint of a 1964 translation, more fluent and natural but more prone to infelicities than a new translation, “No Way Back,” published last year by Angel Books.)

The novel has an odd, misty, rather “Pelléas et Mélisande” atmosphere that has much to do with its unusual setting. It takes place not in Berlin, or even in Germany proper, but in Copenhagen and in the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, a territory whose vexed history—it was the subject of a long series of ownership disputes between Denmark and Prussia, finally and forcibly resolved by the Danish War of 1864—serves as a metaphor for the condition of the main characters’ marriage. The Schleswig-Holstein question, the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston once quipped, was so complicated that only three people understood it, of whom one, the Prince Consort, was dead; another, a foreign-office clerk, had gone mad; and the third, Palmerston himself, had forgotten the whole thing. There’s always a background buzz of politics in Fontane’s novels—a geopolitical correlative for the emotional drama.

Unlike the couple in “On Tangled Paths,” this pair have no obvious impediments to happiness. Both are aristocratic, and they have in fact been long and happily married, with two attractive teen-aged children, all living in a replica of a Greek temple on the Baltic coast. Count Helmut Holk is charming and has many “likeable qualities,” and would, his wife can’t help thinking at the beginning of the novel, “certainly be an ideal husband—if he had any ideals at all of his own.” The countess, Christine, is beautiful, younger, a bit too dogmatic and over-principled—as she herself recognizes. When the author deftly alludes to Christine’s attitude to smoking—something “which the countess did not really allow indoors, although she never forbade it”—you have all the information you need about the passive-aggressiveness that will sink the marriage. In the erosive contest between the two spouses, it’s hard not to feel the ghosts of Fontane’s quarrelling parents, the Prinzipienverächter and the Prinzipienreiter.

Fontane charts the course of the Holks’ marital decline in his usual desultory way—there’s a slow accumulation of talk and events, and then that climactic fillip. The couple bicker about which schools to send the children to; Helmut, suddenly called upon to fulfill his duty as courtier, goes away to Copenhagen for some weeks, where he flirts inconclusively with his landlady’s daughter and, more conclusively, with Ebba (“Eve”), a rather spiky lady-in-waiting to the elderly Princess whom they both serve. He doesn’t write often enough to Christine; there’s a fire in the castle where the Princess is holding court (no one gets hurt); in a fit of midlife foolishness, Helmut tells Christine it’s all over and proposes to the lady-in-waiting, who then tells him off (“You’re always sinning against the most elementary rules of the game”); eventually, he comes home to his wife. The moment of narrative “excitement” takes place five pages from the end of the book. As Holk’s scheming landlady says of her daughter’s wayward life, “It’s something of a love-story but it’s not a proper love-story.”

As in “On Tangled Paths,” the pleasure of the novel lies in its subtlety—in this case, a discreet exploration of marital psychology. Here again, trouble starts within and, like a dry rot, eats its way outward. The novel begins with one of Fontane’s unemphatic epiphanies: in the course of an ordinary domestic conversation one day, Christine realizes that the terrain of her marriage has, somehow, shifted under her feet. “In spite of having the best of husbands whom she loved as much as he loved her, she yet did not possess that peace for which she longed; in spite of all their love, his easy-going temperament was no longer in harmony with her melancholy.” The symbol of the fatal disharmony is the crumbling family vault, which Christine, her thoughts already in the grave, longs to rebuild in a grand way. Fontane’s plots refer with striking frequency to cemeteries, graves, burials, funerals—even ghosts.

The haunted perception of imminent emotional failure—which, typically, the more sentimental male character resists at first—colors everything that follows in precisely the way the bad faith of a crumbling relationship poisons even the most innocent exchanges. This phenomenon is, indeed, one that the novel evokes in harrowing detail. (“In my correspondence with Christine,” Helmut heatedly writes to her brother, who is also his close friend, “I have never been able to strike the right note. As soon as one finds oneself suspected, it is very difficult to maintain the right tone and attitude.”) And, as in “On Tangled Paths,” Fontane gives us access to the kind of tortured emotional self-justification that unhappy lovers are prone to. Here is Helmut, “interpreting” the fact that he wasn’t killed in the fire:

If all my feelings had been wrong all this time, punishment would have overtaken us and Ebba and I would have fallen unconscious and been suffocated and never found our way to safety. And if I understood Christine’s last letter properly, she also feels that this will be the best thing for us to do. All those happy days we spent together mustn’t be forgotten, of course not . . . but part we must and I think it is our duty to do so.

Well, not quite predictable: “Irretrievable” lingers in an unexpected cul-de-sac before it realizes the promise of its title. But even after the couple ostensibly reconcile, there’s really nothing left; by the end of this mild yet anguished work, all that remains of the marriage is a lifeless residue of thwarted yearning—“nothing but the willingness to be happy.” As so often in the fiction of Theodor Fontane, that’s not enough to save the characters, but it’s a marvellous subject for a novel. ♦